Snap into Mobile Excellence

The best experience on a mobile application can be built with both high level of engineering and deep human behaviour understanding.

As the most valued channel to your target group, the mobile application should reflect an ideal world in which there is no any crash, no waiting, no mess, no wrong paths and no being in jam at all.

Excellent apps come with highly precise user experience. When we work on the paths and scenarios of one of our mobile application’s user experience, we desire to find best solutions to reach target group’s demands in the most proper way. This is called UXX (user experience excellence) in our discipline. We are not only following standards, but the possible journeys of the users and being aware of their behaviours which come from natural human motivations, abilities and triggers (human-factors). As BJ Fogg, behavior scientist at Standford University, said:

Behaviour happens when Motivation, Ability, and Prompt come together at the same moment.

Target group’s behaviours can be transformed into our (as a provider) preferred user actions if we understand these users’ motivations or if we can motivate the users with ability-supporting user interfaces and easy-of-use structures.

On the way of reaching excellence, it is required to go up a higher level of experience: EX. Since you want fully engagement with your target groups, your mobile application needs to be appealing, effective, and providing emotional signals which are taken with no conscious effort. Well-designed Emotional Experience (EX) for mobile applications provides big help to improve the success of business goals.

As a clear example;

We prefer to describe it as “home” instead of “the flat I live in.

Rather than making a dull and boring definition for your place, choosing the word “home” includes emotions, memories, and further meanings. Similarly, by building a really good mobile application interfaces and flows with EX-perspective, we will have chosen to awaken positive emotions for the user.

As Christine Ma-Kellams (from the University of La Verne)’s article “Trust Your Gut or Think Carefully?” has shown that triggering happy-impulse is very valued for first impression. After first trigger, you should go with well-designed and well-planned mechanisms in the mobile app to increased success and accuracy.

The excellence is not only related to the interfaces and your human approaches but also to the high level of engineering.

Users expect a robust mobile application first. When they want to access a service or get an information, it is huge motivation-breaker to meet mistakes and crashes. This is why “crash-free user rate” metrics are kept in radar always. You should consider that crashes are one of the biggest factors that cause worst experience and even to bounce from your mobile application. As our mobile applications’ average crash-free user rate is 99.8%, we find it very valuable to take crash-free user rate as a leading technical KPI to achieve multi-faceted goals. The teams must implement the Agile methodology to meet technical KPIs and increase productivity. The Agile methodology, refers to iterative development and applying colloboration between cross-functional teams, is best with DevOps to promote well-disciplined project processes, rapid delivery, and of course high-quality software. Many people think Agile and DevOps have different ideas for projects. Ian Buchanan from Atlassian is thinking that Agile and DevOps work better in combination (Agile and DevOps: Friends or Foes?) as we think too.

Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring…

Excellence is not only a station to arrive, it is a way of journey. Active monitoring of mobile applications is vital to improve quality and to build a better business. In Loodos, we not only deal with crashes and mistakes, but also watch the anomalies carefully. Actions that occur outside the routine of a service must be pursued in the sense that things have gone wrong (even if there are no visible technical mistakes in practice). For example, imagine that you have a promotion in your mobile application (such as gift checks or discounts) and for this promotion, imagine that the users’ reaction is an average of 10 thousand requests per hour. If you are actively monitoring your application, and if the users’ reaction to the promotion is far below the average (eg 200 requests/hour), then there is something to look out for. We have Heuristic Service Monitoring and Analysis (HSMA) to predict all occurings outside the routine. HSMA gives both preventive outputs against to losing of the ideal and improving foresights to better business.

Finally, here we are: Mobile Excellence!

Bringing human behaviour understanding and deep technical abities together will carry the mobile application to level of excellence.